Optimizing Maya to the max

Lord Overmind

Over the past year, I have been looking into maya, and I gotta say, it's a great program! I have just one problem though. The viewport is different from 3ds Max, and I was wondering if there was a way to optimize the viewport. In maya's Viewport 2.0, I usually go to 12 million polygons of subdividing a cube and choppiness began. In 3ds Max however, I manage to get a whopping 50 million polygons when the choppiness began! Here's the list of hardware I have for those curious...

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
16GB DDR3 at 1600 mhz clock speed
2 XFX Radeon HD 6870s in crossfire

I am well aware that gamer cards are not the way to go with Maya, but I need to know if there is a way to optimize the program, switch to max, or get a workstation card. I await replies.